Back to School Grief

I imagined that my life would change last year. I imagined that I would learn to live with the grief I felt when my baby started school. I imagined this year I wouldn’t feel the loss so keenly.

Yet once again I am struggling to hold back the tears.

 

The Girl that made me a Mamma has crossed the divide between Infant and Junior, to Year Three, bringing with it a uniform change, a routine change, a length-of-school-day change and a change in her demeanour. She suddenly looks so grown up, walking casually around buildings she is not used to using, towing a large backpack on one shoulder as if she has done it her whole life, and laughing with her friends about some thing or other I doubt I will understand.

I watch her from afar as I fight the back-to-school grief, a face in a crowd of similarly redundant parents, waiting desperately for her to notice that I am there for her. That I will always be there for her.

I wonder if she sees me pining for her youth; for the rounder face she had when she was two, for the quirky vocabulary the three-year-old her used, for her four-year-old fashion sense, for the terror she held for all things new when she started Reception. For a time when she needed her Mamma. Does she roll her eyes as mine well up? Has she already written me off as embarrassing, out-of-touch, or just plain old? Has she realised yet that I need her far more than she needs me?

When did she get so confident? How long has she enjoyed playing hockey? Why can’t I recall the exact moment that she fell in love with singing? The last seven years have evaporated, leaving behind a handful of memories and a Facebook profile chock-full of images that, if I lay them all end to end, chart the evolution of the girl I drive to school every morning.  You’ll forgive me if I am not ready to confront the startling truth that these changes are nothing compared with those that lay ahead of her, of us.

I am mourning the loss of a baby once again.